Members of the French Academy of Sciences

Jean-Pierre Kahane (11 December 1926 – 21 June 2017) was a French mathematician with contributions to harmonic analysis.

Adrien Douady (French: [adʁijɛ̃ dwadi]; 25 September 1935 – 2 November 2006) was a French mathematician born in La Tronche, Isère. He was the son of Daniel Douady and Guilhen Douady.Douady was a student of Henri Cartan at the École normale supérieure, and initially worked in homological algebra. His thesis concerned deformations of complex analytic spaces. Subsequently, he became more interested in the work of Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia and made significant contributions to the fields of analytic geometry and dynamical systems. Together with his former student John H. Hubbard, he launched a new subject, and a new school, studying properties of iterated quadratic complex mappings. They made important mathematical contributions in this field of complex dynamics, including a study of the Mandelbrot set. One of their most fundamental results is that the Mandelbrot set is connected; perhaps most important is their theory of renormalization of (polynomial-like) maps. The Douady rabbit, a quadratic filled Julia set, is named after him.
Douady taught at the University of Nice and was a professor at the Paris-Sud 11 University, Orsay. He was a member of Bourbaki and an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1966 at Moscow and again in 1986 in Berkeley.
He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1997, and was featured in the French animation project Dimensions.
He died after diving into the cold Mediterranean from a favourite spot near his vacation home in the Var.
His son, Raphael Douady, is also a noted mathematician and an economist.

Jean Dorst (7 August 1924 – 8 August 2001) was a French ornithologist.
Dorst was born at Mulhouse and studied biology and paleontology at the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the University of Paris. In 1947 he joined the staff of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. He succeeded Jacques Berlioz as chairman of Mammifères et Oiseaux in 1964, and was elected as director of the museum in 1975, resigning in 1985 to protest against government reforms of the museum.
Dorst was a member of the Académie des Sciences, one of the founders and second president of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos, president of the 16th International Ornithological Congress (IOC), and vice president of the Commission of Protection of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Dorst was one of the writers of the documentary Le Peuple Migrateur (Winged Migration), and the film is dedicated to him. A companion volume of photographs and essays was published in 2003.

Raymond Daudel (2 February 1920 – 20 June 2006) was a French theoretical and quantum chemist.
Trained as a physicist, he was an assistant to Irène Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. Daudel spent almost the entirety of his career as professor at the Sorbonne and director of a laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He is quoted as saying that the latter "was much better because the CNRS was very rich". This allowed Daudel to attract many co-workers from elsewhere in France and internationally.
Raymond Daudel was Officier de la Légion d'honneur and Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite. He served as President of the European Academy of Arts Sciences and Humanities, in Paris, France. Daudel was a founding member and Honorary President of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.An author as well as an academic, Raymond Daudel authored several books, including Quantum chemistry, originally with R. Lefebyre and C. Moser in 1959 (Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York) and later with G. Leroy, D. Peeters, and M. Sana, published by Wiley in 1983. He was responsible for the organization of the first International Congress in Quantum Chemistry, held in Menton, France in 1973.

Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie (8 November 1881 – 6 December 1957) was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist. He is referred to as being one of the founders of modern rocketry and astronautics, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Germans Hermann Oberth, Wernher Von Braun and the American Robert H. Goddard.

Vincent E. Courtillot (born 6 March 1948) is an emeritus French geophysicist, prominent among the researchers who are critical of the hypothesis that impact events are a primary cause of mass extinction of life forms on the Earth. He is known for his book "La Vie en catastrophes" (Paris, Fayard, 1995), translated into English as "Evolutionary catastrophes" (1999).

Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron (French: [klapɛʁɔ̃]; 26 January 1799 – 28 January 1864) was a French engineer and physicist, one of the founders of thermodynamics.

Édouard Brézin (French: [bʁezɛ̃]; born 1 December 1938 Paris) is a French theoretical physicist. He is professor at Université Paris 6, working at the laboratory for theoretical physics (LPT) of the École Normale Supérieure since 1986.

Catherine Bréchignac (French pronunciation: [katʁin bʁeʃiɲak] ; born 12 June 1946) is a French physicist. She is a commander of the Légion d'honneur, "secrétaire perpétuel honoraire" of the Académie des sciences and former president of the CNRS ("National Centre for Scientific Research"). The Times says she has "a formidable reputation for determination, decisiveness and an aptitude for analysing and clarifying complex matters." As a president of the CNRS, she was responsible for 25,000 employees, 12,000 of whom are researchers, and a budget of 2.42 billion Euros.

Roger Balian (born 18 January 1933) is a French-Armenian physicist who has worked on quantum field theory, quantum thermodynamics, and theory of measurement.
Balian is a member of French Académie des sciences (Academy of Sciences). His important work includes the Balian-Low theorem. He teaches statistical physics at the École Polytechnique.